PLG 2

During our CoL PLG today we were asked to work in groups to unpack a text shared with us before the meeting. The article was called "Building Creative Thinking in the Classroom" Emma Gregory, Mariale Hardiman, Julia Yarmolinskaya, Luke Rinne and Charles Limb. We were then asked to read this and find quotes about the following things. 

• find interesting 
• agree or disagree with
• didn’t know
• believe has important practice implications 

Here is a list of quotes that I found from reading this article:

• Page 44: "In the context of education, perhaps the most valuable question to ask is whether or not creativity is fixed."
• Page 44: "Moreover, despite appreciating the value of facilitating creativity, few teachers feel that they are sufficiently trained to support students’ creative potential."
• Page 47: "Content knowledge within a domain has been argued to be the foundation for creative thinking and innovation (e.g.,Weisberg, 2006). According to this view, creative thinking cannot occur unless one has first mastered a body of content knowledge."
• Page 47: "The authors concluded that raising animals at home led children to have a better understanding of a situation, allowing children to construct mental models of the animals.

There were many great points to this article that really made you think as you were reading. The above quotes were just some of the ones that stood out to me. During our CoL PLG we were then tasked with completing "the last word" where we had to share one of our quotes, the people in our group had to locate this quote and give a quick opinion on this and finally we would have the last word to share our final thoughts. I really enjoyed this task as there were key areas pointed out in the text that I might have otherwise looked over and not really thought about in depth. I feel that we had a greater understanding of the text and also how to pick out key ideas as we were reading along. 

During our PLG we also discussed maths and what could be done to help make a shift and change in maths. The key question being what are the three things you think will make the biggest difference in maths? We had a great discussion about this and what we think will help with maths. One key thing I took away from this was the need for vocabulary in maths which is something I am also seeing in reading. So this was just a thought to ponder over.